Leaders’ body language betrays lack of progress over Syria

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: It seemed too good to be true. There were Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, in Los Cabos, Mexico, for a Group of 20 summit, announcing they’d agreed on a way forward for Syria.

But closer examination of the fine print revealed a disappointing lack of real progress. The Syrian people should independently and democratically be allowed to decide their own future, their joint declaration said, but there was no call for Assad to stand down, as the White House has been urging. Putin remains Bashar’s only friend in the west.

The two leaders’ body language also indicated little sense of rapprochement. That’s even though chilly seems to be Obama’s default setting and chillier Putin’s. There was nothing of the seeming warm that arose between the Russian leader and Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush.

It’s hard to tell if President Barack Obama got a sense of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s soul. In front of reporters, they hardly looked at each other.
In their first meeting since 2009, Obama and Putin shared little eye contact and did not appear to express much personal warmth following a two-hour meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Putin made brief remarks and then looked down at the table as Obama spoke to reporters, aided by a translator.
The gathering had a much different feel compared with President George W. Bush’s first meeting with Putin in Slovenia in June 2001. Bush said then that he was “able to get a sense of his soul.”
Yet aides said the media shouldn’t draw any conclusions from the chilly body language. They said the meeting wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did if the two leaders didn’t get along.

Michael Weiss at The Daily Telegraph says western democracies are hamstrung because they don’t understand the mindset of eastern tyrants like Putin.

The truth is this. Putin’s only criticism of Assad is that Assad has not already destroyed this annoying little revolution and convinced the world that he is doing so as part of of the global war on terror. (The man rumoured to be running Moscow’s Syria policy is Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s successor as director of the FSB.) When Russia sounds more conciliatory to the Western position, it is to buy more time for Damascus. If Putin has one lament, it is only that Bassel al-Assad, Bashar’s smarter older brother, died in a car crash in 1994. Thus was a perfectly good client state entrusted to a combination of Fredo Corleone and Forrest Gump. If Putin ever did accede to a “transition” of power, you can be sure the man to take Bashar’s place would be more like Bassel, and like Vladimir.

Ever the pragmatist, Putin is due to travel to Israel next week, notes Alex Rowell at NOW Lebanon.

In a story that I wager will not make the Syrian state press, Russian President Vladimir Putin – whose watertight loyalty to his ally Bashar al-Assad has been hailed by “resistance” types as a mark of his unshakeable anti-imperialist grit and courage – is set to travel to Israel next week, where among other things he will be opening a World War II memorial in the city of Netanya. He will also be travelling to the West Bank (to meet Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, arch-foe of ‘resistance axis’ heavyweight Hamas), and to Jordan (one of only two Arab countries to have made peace with Israel).
Sadly for his protégé Bashar, Putin doesn’t seem to have made time for a stopover in Damascus.

The Syrian president might be saddened, but not surprised. A profile by Roula Khalef in the Financial Times indicates he would behave in exactly the same way, given the opportunity.

“Assad and his people lie openly – even when it is obvious that what they are saying cannot be true,” says a former diplomat who has dealt with Assad. People who were involved in foreign policy say deceit was one of the main tactics used by Assad to deflect pressures. Samir al-Taqi, for example, recalls that in talks with the European Union on an association agreement, he was instructed to “always say yes.” “We were told that it was important for the other side to feel everything is going well… and that it should take them six months to find out that it was not.”

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